William Gaddis: A very fine shambles

“
Another damned thick, square book.” It is easy to imagine William
Gaddis responding thus to the publication of his letters, quoting, as he
regularly did in connection with his novels, a remark thrown at Edward
Gibbon by a royal duke of the time. One can also guess that such a comment
would not in this case have been a cover, as surely it was with his
fictional works, for pride in achievement. Gaddis worked for seven years on
his first novel, the thousand-page page-turner The Recognitions,
which appeared in 1955, when he was thirty-two, and another two decades
passed before he published his second, JR, a narrative almost as
long, and unbroken. A believer in the “P. E.” (Protestant Ethic), he knew
very well what these books represented in terms of hours at the typewriter,
and what they required, too, not only of imagination and stamina but also of
rage.

Particularly in the years after JR, with his work increasingly known
and the world increasingly nosy, he had to defend himself repeatedly against
requests for interviews and explanations, sometimes referring his enquirers
to words he had given the painter protagonist of The Recognitions:
“What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? . . .
What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology”. And
the punctuation here indicates this is not really a question.

His letters he would no doubt have regarded as part of the shambles. In 1984,
Gaddis replied to an enquiry from Steven Moore, the editor of this volume,
then a doctoral student, to warn him that “my early letters were many times
written with the vain notion of eventual publication & thus obviously
much embarrassing nonsense”. Hugh Kenner’s review of Ernest Hemingway’s
letters had shown the danger, for Kenner had used them “to flay the writer &
point up frailties in his work as glimpses of the ‘real’ Hemingway, I think
really these things go quite the opposite, the letters are the detritus, &c”.

Gaddis kept not only his working materials, however, but copies and drafts of
letters, and came to accept, grudgingly, that an edition was inevitable.
They are, to be sure, not the work. While they convey the grand, growling
Gaddisian voice, only rarely do they lift off with the comma-free,
cliché-dosed, looping and wonderfully rhythmic energy of some of the best
and funniest passages from his novels, one such exception coming in a letter
he wrote soon after a visit to New Zealand in 1987, which for him was most
essentially the location of Erewhon. He needed to find a place to work:
“which may even end up right here in Manhattan with a terrace &
all air conditioning that people kill for hardly that bad after all though
glimpses of peace over the bay at Wellington & sheep of Christchurch
lead one astray where Butler after all got his first breath . . .”.

Gaddis came to accept, grudgingly, that an edition of his letters was inevitable

Later still, when Gaddis was becoming more open about his methods and
meanings, he wrote of the necessity “that style must match content”, and
gave some examples of how that had led to different approaches in the four
novels he had published – the only ones to come out during his lifetime, the
fifth being posthumous. In his letters, though, the style is pretty uniform:
plainspoken, unsentimental, touched occasionally with wit (usually
self-mocking), and salted with idiosyncratic spellings and typos that Moore,
in editing, retains. The novels remain in their several magnificent
elsewheres. But if these letters only rarely convey some flash or sniff of
them, they testify richly to the life and the mind from which they came. If
this is the “shambles”, it has a sure value, and not just as a document of
persistence.

Given the thoroughness of Moore’s notes, which profit from investigations he
began in the 1970s, the book is almost a biography, jointly written by
subject and adept, the one reporting from day to day, the other having the
whole horizon in view. It tells a story of routine jobs undertaken for pay,
of failures in intimate relationships and of plentiful evidence the world
gave Gaddis of its indifference, but this is a record, too, of resilience
and self-certainty (at least as far as the work was concerned), and of
ideals – and friends – maintained lifelong.

In a late letter to Stanley Elkin, one of the colleagues he came to admire,
Gaddis writes that “age 72 is daily more infringed by that blond pageboy off
to boarding school age 5”. This is almost where we begin, with an account of
school activities he sent his mother when he was just ten days past his
eighth birthday. Edith Gaddis, whose husband had left well before this, was
the recipient of most of the letters collected here from the next twenty
years and more, years that took her son to Haiti, Mexico, Panama, Costa
Rica, Spain, Paris and North Africa, as well as the American West (and
Harvard, briefly), as he pursued a life of varied adventure. He was also
beginning to write. “I have been working very hard”, he sends word to his
mother from Mexico City in April 1947. “Many days. On a novel.” By December
– now in Panama, working in the Canal Zone, where he would quickly come to
see his country as deserting its responsibilities (“America I have such pity
for, fury at”) – he had “started the plans for another novel”, which would
be partly a study of abdication, deception and self-deception, expressing
pity for and fury at not just one nation but the whole human race: The
Recognitions.

More than a quarter of this volume of correspondence is devoted to the period
when Gaddis was writing his first published novel, though his references to
work are at first few, interspersed among travel plans, notes on what he has
seen and done, and concerns expressed for his recipients. Not until his
return to New York, in the spring of 1951, does he settle to work in
earnest, reading (“I’ve joined an excellent library”) and writing. By March
1, 1952, he has “almost 100,000 words”; four months later there are “some
150 or 160 thousand”. His Christmas request to his mother is for a 500-sheet
box of paper – “And another ribbon please”. The following spring the work is
done: “a half million words!”.

The astonished satisfaction in that exclamation mark (a rare thing in the
letters) was, however, soon to be assailed, first by a not uncommon
post-partum depression – “This ‘work’ bores me infinitely, a lousy long
boring pretentious adolescent parade of attempts at experience” – and then
by the volleys of reviewers. Granville Hicks’s airy dismissal in the New
York Times went on rankling for years, but what seems to have bothered
Gaddis most was the misrecognition, cued by Stuart Gilbert’s blurb, of
Joycean influence. More than once here he insists that he had read very
little Joyce, and the evidence of his pre-Recognitions letters backs
him up: no mention of the Irish writer, but intense involvement with Arnold
Toynbee’s Study of History followed by The White Goddess
(at a time when he went to Majorca just to visit Robert Graves) together
with (all through, and almost to the end of his life) the Four Quartets
recalled as a source of wisdom and warning. “If I named a single influence
it would certainly be T. S. Eliot who still takes my breath away as he did
then”, he wrote in 1972.

Although he had already discounted biographical curiosity in the early pages
of The Recognitions, the book’s reception seems to have confirmed him
in his aloofness and his desire to separate his work from diagnoses of
influence, whether misguided, as in the case of Joyce, or possibly accurate,
as in that of his friend Martin S. Dworkin, who felt that Gaddis should
acknowledge the importance of their conversations to his first novel.
Dworkin appears intermittently in these pages, not as a correspondent but in
letters to others: “we left it that I will call him sometime” (1974);
“dinner with Martin who is so mad at everyone he’s ever known that he’ll
outlive us all” (1984); “Martin I finally simply gave up on” (1995). His is
one of the subplots (and perhaps an important one) that, as in a Gaddis
novel, skim by in a trace.

JR took so much longer than The Recognitions for several
reasons. There was a false start: a Civil War play, large chunks of which
were to be recycled in Gaddis’s fourth novel, A Frolic of His Own
(1994). Also, now with a family to support, Gaddis was earning money writing
for Pfizer, Eastman-Kodak and other enterprises (Moore informs us that his
second published book was A Pile Fabric Primer: Corduroy, velveteen,
velvet, 1970, written for the Crompton-Richmond Company). His experience
of the business world fed into the new novel, but the work’s form made its
writing laborious: “since it’s almost all in dialogue I’m constantly
listening, write a line and then have to stop and listen, does it sound like
the character talking? and get across his feeling and appearance without me
describing him?”.

The royalties received on The Recognitions told their own tale: $5.56 in May 1980,
$11.48 in November the next year

The completion of JR, in the summer of 1974, led to another comma-less
rush in a letter to an old writer friend, Warren Kiefer:

“I ‘finished’ this book 1004 (legal size) pages am now on page 180
cutting ruthlessly nothing to make you wearier of yourself than artfulness
when you were 10 years younger whole God damned proposition like living with
an invalid real God damned terminal case you keep hoping will pick up his
God damned bed and walk.”

Yes, we may agree, this does sound like a character talking, and getting his
feeling across.

Critical response to JR was more positive, even in some quarters
enthusiastic, and the novel won Gaddis the National Book Award, to be
followed by other prizes and fellowships that helped sustain him during the
remainder of his life. The accolades evidently cheered him, but what he
really wanted were readers, and here the royalties received on The
Recognitions told their own tale: $5.56 in May 1980, $11.48 in November
the next year, a debit of $4.29 six months after that. The book was gaining
its scholarly apparatus, with the publication of Moore’s Reader’s
Guide in the year of that debit statement, and was helping form writers
of the next generation, such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace,
while its readership remained pitifully small. Respectful neglect, coupled
with the breakdown of a second marriage and anger at the Reagan
administration’s meddling in an area he knew from half a lifetime before,
Central America, may all have contributed to the “fuelling indignation” he
needed to write his third novel, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985),
much smaller and closely focused on two people crouching under the past.

The past was also claiming Gaddis, his letters more and more dealing with
questions about his work from aficionados in the US and abroad. Through the
late 1980s and early 90s, however, he was clearly having fun, too, writing
the legal satire that became A Frolic of His Own. As he read up cases
in the eighty-four volumes of American Jurisprudence and corresponded
with lawyers, he was putting together an exuberant comedy voiced again
largely in dialogue, intercut with court opinions, passages from his Civil
War play (whose fictional author is suing a Hollywood studio for breach of
copyright) and, as always, long sentences of startling descriptive power.
Half the size of The Recognitions or JR, funnier and certainly
sunnier than Carpenter’s Gothic, this was his most appealing
book.

In the later letters, from his last four years, his growl is more sombre.
There were medical indignities. In a repetition of what had happened with
his two marriages, his companion moved out. His children, youthful stars in
his sparse firmament, were encountering the travails of middle life. He
lost, or lost touch with, some of his oldest friends, including the British
painter John Napper, to whom he had been writing regularly since 1950.
Meanwhile, he was struggling with a project that went back even further: an
examination of the player piano, or pianola. It was the discovery of Thomas
Bernhard that enabled him to complete this task as Agapè Agape,
published in 2002, four years after his death.

There was no dialogue now, just the caustic, unswerving Bernhardian voice,
which seems to have been waiting for him. So was, however strange it
appeared, the player piano, for his work came from having witnessed during
his life how “so many taken for granted values and obligations were sundered
not to be recovered, or reinstituted today [1982] in my own strong opinion,
in imitation of those earlier forms”. The moral soul, composing its life on
the keyboard of the world, had been replaced by a paper directive;
organizations – business, religion (for Gaddis another kind of business),
the law, Washington – had made people their pawns; “all that distinguishes
us from the machines is their ability to learn from their mistakes”.

Gaddis was always good at pessimism (“I’ve got rid of most of the despair &
am now just desperate”), but he could have added – and implicitly in these
letters often does – that we are distinguished also by our ability to
protest, to parody, to frustrate the pattern and, in a word, to live,
“every, every moment”, to add another of his favourite quotations, from
Thornton Wilder. As he wrote to his daughter, “damnedest thing is people
saying I’m negative whereas it’s these affirmations of life amidst its
appalling uncertainties and setbacks that I most admire”. Bitter and
admonitory, but also cherishing of minutiae, sometimes luminous in their
scene-painting, at other times hilarious, and all the while surging on, his
novels are among such triumphs.

Paul Griffiths is the author of a standard book on music since 1945, Modern
Music and After (third edition, 2010).